Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23) Read online

  FLASHBACK

  OUT OF THE BOX

  BOOK 23

  Robert J. Crane

  FLASHBACK

  OUT OF THE BOX: BOOK 23

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2018 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1.

  Four damned walls.

  That was what surrounded me as I sat, waiting, for something to happen.

  Grey concrete walls, ten feet high, a ceiling of old, stained tile. Floor of concrete, dark as ground-out cigarette ends. The room smelled like it predated smoking bans, so maybe it came by that color honestly.

  A table. Scarred white surface, a thousand wear lines and scratches suggesting long use. One chair opposite mine, the wooden back visible and reminding me of the kind I'd seen in a school the time I'd done a “Scared Straight” talk to kids in an outstate Minnesota school.

  The wall across from me was mirrored, the entire length of it, a long strip of reflection that started waist-high and went to the ceiling, reflecting back everything in my half of the room.

  And then there was me. Dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, pissed off, impatient, staring at myself but really staring at the one-way mirror and the jackasses who were surely hiding behind it, wishing they would get. The. Hell. On with it.

  How long had I been here? It was hard to say. It felt like months since the big, steel door had closed me in, since the stern government agent in the black suit with the ponytail had told me, “Just wait here for a minute,” and disappeared.

  How long had it really been?

  Hell if I knew.

  I'd gotten off a plane just before being brought here. A C-130 Hercules had delivered me to Washington DC on the president's orders. The soldiers who'd escorted me home signed some paperwork when we'd arrived at Joint Base Andrews, we'd said our farewells, and I'd gotten into a black government SUV with black-suited government agents that had brought me...

  Here. A shitty old government building on the outskirts of DC, where I now stared at myself in a one-way mirror wishing I had eyebeam lasers so I could blast through the assholes behind it. If only they'd get their damned thumbs out and move on with...

  ...whatever the hell this was.

  Part of me wanted to stand up, raise my foot, and swing it back to kick my own ass. I'd bought into it when SecDef Bruno Passerini, the man they called “Hammer,” had told me the president was ordering me home for...I dunno. Pardon. Absolution. Whatever the cross between forgiving me of my sins and dismissing the charges was.

  Instead, I was locked in a cell, staring at myself.

  Had Passerini betrayed me?

  I kinda doubted it. He didn't need to, though. That was the problem with serving an immense Leviathan of a government. He'd just followed orders to deliver me to the next link in the bureaucratic chain; what happened after receipt of package wasn't his fault.

  And I had been delivered to the shittiest place in the entire United States, the malarial swamp known as Washington DC. It didn't take much imagination to think I might just disappear into said swamp, especially given that less than a week ago the US government had tried to make me disappear in a prison for metahumans.

  Was that really less than a week ago? Wow. I'd really been through the ringer since then. Prison break. War with my great-grandfather and his little country. Nuclear missile launches. Saving the freaking world. Again.

  Hook. Line. Sinker. That was how my dumb ass had bought it, almost crying in front of Warren Quincy – the Terminator – and a bunch of Navy SEALs when Passerini had told me I was coming home a hero.

  I said none of this aloud now. Showed no reaction but to glare at the glass.

  Hell if I'd give these bastards the satisfaction of seeing my brain spin on a perpetual loop.

  I gave good glare, though. If they were back there, I knew they had to be feeling the heat. After all, I'd recently massacred an entire metahuman Russian mercenary division. Only an idiot would be sitting behind that glass calmly knowing I was awake, irritable, and glaring at them through the glass. Like staring at the bobcat through the plastic divider at the Minnesota zoo. That animal was always pacing, looking at the people. If you didn't have faith in the guard between you, it'd be pretty damned unnerving.

  Especially knowing the bobcat could probably bust out and rip you to pieces at any time.

  And I was thinking about it. I'd have been a fool not to. If I got so much as a hint of gas pushing out of one of the vents, boom, I'd go through that mirror and then through someone's face, decisions to not run be damned.

  I sat there a while longer.

  How long?

  Hell if I knew. I didn't have a cell phone or a watch. Felt like hours. Could have been minutes.

  Glared.

  Oh, how I glared.

  There was no sound. Not even a chatter or a whisper from behind the mirrored glass. I knew they were there, but it must have been incredibly insulated for me not to hear them with my metahuman senses. Nothing but the hum of the overhead fluorescents kept me company.

  There was a subtle distortion effect in the mirror. Probably a manufacturing thing, or something that happened during installation, a slight bending of the reflection at the level of my face. It was marginal but made one of my cheeks stick out farther to the right, the other to push in, and my nose to look a few degrees off axis. Without trying to be too obvious about it, I reached up and checked just to be sure I hadn't gotten my face mashed in my recent fighting. It felt fine, so I maintained my glare and tried to ignore the slightly funhouse-mirror quality of my own reflection.

  Also, I kinda looked like hell. And would it have killed them to offer me something to eat? My stomach rumble
d like slow thunder, and for a second I thought maybe I was hearing a storm in the distance. Then the vibrato shook the inside of my rib cage, and I realized I couldn't remember when I'd last had a meal.

  Still, I stared. Never looked away. The key to maintaining your badass, fearless image was really just unrelenting discipline. If I could have cemented my eyes open, I would have, that's how committed I was to making these government types stew in wonder of what I'd do if they made a move against me. Would they make it out alive before they could put me down like a rabid dog? They'd have to put a big fat wager on the line to find out – their very lives.

  It was funny how the prospect of being caged changed my attitude so quickly. Hours earlier, over Europe, I'd been ready to surrender to my fate and the possibility of prison again. But now, in the hours since I'd been told, “Nah, kid, you're going to be free!” my brain had quickly adjusted to the idea of what I could do now that my run was over. I'd spent the whole flight thinking about what would come next, of finding Harry, of reuniting with my friends. I'd started making plans. Now...

  I looked at the four walls. The aged ceiling, scratched-up furniture, stained floor. Two chairs, table, mirror, me.

  Freedom my ass.

  I blinked. I had to, my eyes were burning. But when I opened my eyes again, after that millisecond of non-contact with the world visually...

  Something had changed.

  Something...swam across the table in front of me like a larger-scale version of the mirror distortion. It wasn't slow, it wasn't subtle, and if I'd been a slightly more excitable person I would have overturned my chair trying to get the hell away from...whatever it was.

  But I was tired, and I was cranky, and hell if I was going to show whoever was behind the mirror that they were successfully getting to me with this...trick of light or whatever. I adjusted my gaze down, watching the table twist and shift colors-

  And then...

  I was suddenly not in the room anymore.

  There were not four walls around me.

  There was no ceiling. Grass as green as any I'd ever seen replaced the floor.

  The table was gone, so was the chair across from me, and I was sitting on...

  A bench. White concrete supports anchored either side, red wooden beams ran crosswise for me to sit on and lean back against. A mini billboard on the seat proclaiming the name of some realtor greeted me along with his cheesy smile. His phone number was right there, prefaced by a 515 area code.

  I blinked, looking around.

  The sky was blue, the dull cream ceiling replaced by bright cerulean, occasional puffy cloud catching albedo from the sun. Tree tops stirred with a sudden breeze that awakened the faint hairs on my forearms, sending goosebumps across my scalp.

  “What...the hell?” I asked, looking around.

  Someone shouted in the distance. A jogger went past less than ten feet away, shoes pounding against the concrete path that wended by me.

  I sat.

  Stared.

  Waited.

  To see if the mirror came back. If the room came back.

  To see if anyone was watching me.

  I don't know how long I sat there. Maybe an hour, maybe a few minutes.

  People played. Jogged. A kid flew a kite across the meadow in the distance, dad chasing after him.

  The gloomy DC office building was gone.

  I was in a park, not a government cage.

  I was...free?

  “Huh,” I said, looking around. “That...is a hell of a thing.”

  2.

  Eventually I stood up, and eventually I moved around, and when I did, I found...

  I was definitely not in DC anymore. And while that might have been cause for some celebration, under normal circumstances – being freed as I was from what was rapidly looking like a return to prison – disappearing from one, office-building place and appearing in another, park place? Of the non-Monopoly variety?

  That was not normal, not even for weirdo metahuman me.

  A mystery. Yay. Usually I got a little bit of a break between my various cases, but life sure was conspiring to keep me busy lately, throwing cartel metas at me followed by prison riots then a whole war and now...

  Well, I didn't know what this was. A disappearing office building? A magically appearing park?

  “Occam's razor,” I muttered under my breath, pacing away from the bench as I looked around, trying to get the lay of the land. If I had indeed been pulled out of the government building, in my experience it would not be followed by a long rest on a beach with fruity drinks. Oh, no, any gift horse was immediately followed by a giant horse bite, laden with lots of infectious diseases. Or something like them, since I didn't really get sick. What was the metahuman equivalent of an infectious disease? Taylor Swift singing, maybe?

  What was the simplest explanation for how I was suddenly in a city park, somewhere in America? Because this was plainly America. I knew it for a fact as I walked the concrete path, leaving the bench behind, as I dipped under the shade of the trees straddling the trail. The real estate agent's telephone number was definitely American. Up ahead I could see shops, all the signs in plain American English. One of them was a diner, another was a laundromat. Taller buildings lurked beyond the edges of the park, though the trees did a pretty good job of obscuring them.

  Some reasonably tall ones peeked out of the branches here and there. Which ruled out Washington, DC, where there were almost no buildings taller than about fifteen stories. There was a sizable downtown lurking in the distance, and I could catch glimpses of it here and there beyond the trees.

  “Two possibilities,” I muttered, as another jogger passed me, giving me a glance, then a double-take that confirmed that I was in fact here, that they did hear me, and that I might look slightly like a crazy person in my war-torn clothing. Shouldn't have passed on Warren Quincy's offer of a military flight jumpsuit that was twelve sizes too big for me. I would have looked slightly less crazy shuffling around in a city park, talking to myself, wearing that than the shredded garb I'd worn through the Revelen war.

  “Possibility one...I just got teleported to...wherever this is,” I said, picking up my pace so as to head toward the downtown skyline. If I saw it, there was a strong likelihood I could identify it. I'd been to a lot of cities in America and could identify quite a few of them on sight. “Possibility two...this is all in someone's head, maybe mine.”

  I liked that idea less. Because being delusional didn't sound like fun, unless you considered it in comparison to sitting in a government interrogation room, glaring at the one-way mirror. Being mindjacked might just be more enjoyable than that, at least in the short-term.

  A car rolled by on a street ahead, just past the end of the heavy trees, and I stared. It was an old-model minivan, except it looked pretty new. Past it was a gas station at the corner of two streets, and a convenience store waited just beyond the pumps.

  Hmm. Maybe that was a place to get some answers to basic questions like, “Where am I?” I'd need to be careful about it, though, in order to avoid sounding insane.

  The double doors clacked slightly on their tracks as they swept open in front of me. The sign above the door read “Mom and Pop's,” in old-timey lettering. It was set up as a typical convenience store, coolers ringing the walls, shelves filled with junk food and other staples in the center, a nice coffee machine and soda fountain straight ahead. To my left was the counter, complete with a bored store clerk staring dully at me. Her name tag read 'Jane'.

  Jane twisted her face into a smile, though it looked like it took some effort. “Welcome to Mom and Pop's. What can I do ya for?”

  I frowned. I know that's a pretty common line among old oddballs but hearing someone ask what they could 'do me for' made me think – just for an uncomfortable second – she was propositioning me. “Hi. I was wondering...” Pause. Note to self: Try to sound sane. Force a light smile that probably looks terrifying. “...Where am I?”

  She stared back blank
ly. “You're in Mom and Pop's.”

  “Yes, I know I'm in the store 'Mom and Pop's,” I said. “More broadly, though...where am I?”

  She stared back at me, eyes narrowing as she studied me with a little intensity. “Oh, I see. Philosophically. I understand. I did a couple years at the University of Chicago and those are just the sort of deeper questions we liked to contemplate-”

  “No,” I said. “I meant literally-”

  “Hey, are you all right?” Jane asked, with a broad midwestern accent, scanning me up and down. “You look like you've been through it.”

  “I've been through it, all right,” I said, and a thought occurred. “Do you...not know who I am?”

  She looked kind of frozen, deer in the headlights. “Uhm...should I know? Are you on one of those new sitcoms? Because they've always got me working nights lately and my VCR is terrible-”

  “VCR?” I blinked. “Who uses a – never mind.” I shook my head. “No, I'm wondering, in the very literal, geographical sense – where am I?”

  “Mom and Pop's,” she said again, looking at me with the first, vague hint that I might be crazy. It was in the slight disengagement of her body as she took a half step back.

  I sighed and slumped. “Third base.”

  “No, 'I don't know who' is on third,” she said. “There is no 'where' in that skit.”

  “Well, at least you know your comedy,” I said, and looked down past the counter. There was a stack of newspapers sitting there, with 'The Des Moines Register' blared across the top of the page. “Ah ha!” I said, then my shoulders slumped. “What the hell? I'm in Iowa?”

  “Wait, you really didn't know where you were?” Jane had her elbows back on the counter. I guess I'd gone from dangerously crazy to unassuming kook with that admission.

  “Do you think I would have been asking if I'd known?” I bent down to look at the newspaper headline, sure it'd have been something to do with the Revelen situation. I'd been on a plane and in that room for the better part of a day, plenty of time for the newspapers to bleat about nuclear war at the top of their lungs and get a new edition out. Instead, the front-page headline read, “State to study cities' impact on water.” That was it. A secondary headline in the right-hand column read, “Killer quake rocks Taiwan.”